Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 27.djvu/270

256 single interest and question can not command the respectful consideration that uniform, just, and reasonable legislation would receive from all intelligent persons interested; hence, it may be fairly stated that in this country legislation relating to the testing of petroleum is in in many respects unsatisfactory.

It is not, however, to the generally unsafe character of low-test oils that I wish to call attention, but to those characteristics, not yet generally or fully recognized, that render some oils that come within the legal provisions regarding test unhealthy and unsafe for use.

The petroleum industry, in many of its aspects, is the product of development. This statement is true, not only as respects its vast magnitude, but also as pertaining to many of its details. The process of cracking had been employed in treating the distillates from coal before petroleum became an article of commerce; yet petroleum, for a number of years following its discovery in large quantities, was uniformly distilled into naphtha, normal burning-oil, and paraffine-oil. At that time but few uses were known for naphtha, and it was a drug in the market. At the same time the paraffine-oils were contaminated with more or less of the products of destructive distillation that were unavoidable attendants of even rapid distillation. These oils were consequently very poor lubricators, and, moreover, possessed a very unpleasant odor. They never commanded a good price and were slow of sale, for which reason it was obviously the interest of the manufacturer to put into the burning-oil as large a proportion of the naphtha as possible, for the purpose of holding in solution a maximum quantity of paraffine-oil. This often produced an oil unsafe from excess of naphtha, but it was an oil consisting mainly of normal oil, and almost entirely of the educts of the petroleum. Sulphur had not then been observed as an impurity in burning-oil, although the same process of treatment was then used, but less carefully than now. As the original district of Oil Creek produced, at the end of ten years, a smaller proportion of the entire production of crude oil, the character of the burning-oil on the market in 1875 was different from what it was in 1865. At the former date the "lower country," so called in Butler and Clarion Counties, yielded an oil in some respects different from that of Oil Creek, and unequaled for the manufacture of burning oil, inasmuch as the percentage of normal oils suitable for burning was found to be considerably greater. In five years the diminished production in the Butler-Clarion field, and the increased production of the Bradford district, together with the mixing of the entire production in huge tanks and pipe-lines without regard to quality, had entirely changed the relation of the amount of normal to that of cracked and mixed oils. The vast production and low price of crude oil had thrown the manufacture of petroleum into the hands of corporations controlling immense capital, and establishments in which the oil is handled in quantities proportionate to the enormous demand.